Interpretation and generation incremental management in natural interaction systems

Human interaction develops as an exchange of contributions between participants. The construction of a contribution is not an activity unilaterally created by the participant who produces it, but rather it constitutes a combined activity between the producer and the rest of the participants who take part in the interaction, by means of simultaneous feedback. This paper presents an incremental approach (without losing sight of how turns are produced throughout time), in which the interpretation of contributions is done as they take place, and the final generated contributions are the result of constant rectifications, reformulations and cancellations of the initially formulated contributions. The Continuity Manager and the Processes Coordinator components are proposed. The integration of these components in natural interaction systems allow for a joint approach to these problems. Both have been implemented and evaluated in a real framework called LaBDA-Interactor System which has been applied to the “dictation domain”. We found that the degree of naturalness of this turn-taking approach is very close to the human one and it significantly improves the interaction cycle.